About three months ago a socialising web site I’ve been a member of for some years made some significant changes to their web site that included a lot of new coding. Just after the changes occurred I went to MyAccount at the site and the home page displayed with a section replaced by a note “Some code errors have occurred on this page. Tech Support has been notified.” It also said I had two emails – I’d got an email telling me I had mail at the site, hence the visit. On trying to access the email I kept getting messages the web page doesn’t exist.
I sent an email to the site tech support help centre about the issue. I got the usual form letter ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’
Meanwhile, I examined the site code and found the issue seemed to be the way the new site code was selecting then placing my member ID in the code for the calling of the other pages. But couldn’t see why it was causing errors with that as the code ID was right but the URLs kept coming up as not found. Don’t you hate the 404s.
A week later I got an email from tech support telling me how to fix a problem totally unrelated to my problem. I politely responded with the original info again and explained I wasn’t interested in creating a group. Two more days and I get an email saying it’s fixed. I check, not fixed, so I respond it’s not fixed.
Two more days and another email say – ‘Stop bugging us while we fix it.’ Well duh, they said they fixed, so why is telling them the fix didn’t work an issue?
Another week and I get an email saying the case is closed. Check sight, no fix. Raise new error report on the same issue.
Three weeks later I post a note on site about the problem and my intention not to use the site if it doesn’t get fixed soon. Four more weeks of no contact, so I remove all the personal information I can from the site, but the problem won’t let me access all the areas so some of the things like photos are still there. I place a note on the page and the bulletin board about what’s happening and the info I will no longer access the site at all.
Three more days and tech support send me a message saying it’s fixed. revisit, not fixed. I send them this info and they say they’ve checked the site and the code, all is OK, must be a problem with my system.
Now we get to the crux of the matter.
I test access from several machines. Mac, problem; MS Win XP, all works; Free BSD, problem; PCLinux, problem; Kubuntu, problem; SuSe, problem. Win 98, problem.
I send their tech support this information and get a nastily worded response which summarises as – so you’re silly enough to use Mac, our FAQs say Mac don’ t work on the current site, why didn’t you read the FAQs first?
I respond that I did read the FAQs and they say nothing about issues with Linux, which is what I used, the MAC only came in as a multi platform test.
The next email from their Tech Support long but summarises nicely as – stiff, we code for use with Win XP, if you’re silly enough to use something else, bug off. Don’t trouble us with this garbage again.
Well, they didn’t give me MyTechSupport like they claim, and they clearly have some bad or weird code in their which I can’t find. So I sent them an email saying I regard my account closed but since I can’t access the area to delete, they best do it. A week gone by and it’s still there.
Now the trick question for you all:
Can anyone think of one of the major Tech Support mistakes they did NOT make in this case?
I think this is a classic case of how not to do tech support.
